Microsoft Underestimated Baldur’s Gate 3 Before Release

A few days back, a massive amount of confidential information about Microsoft’s current and upcoming plans for Xbox hardware and games was uploaded to a federal court site. Someone from the company seems to be responsible for this huge info leak. Among those leaked documents, there was an email between Microsoft executives. In that email, the company shared a list of upcoming game releases for the year 2023. The company completely ignored the mark on Baldur’s Gate 3 by ranking it at the very bottom of its list of games set for Q2 2023. Moreover, they dismissed the game as a ‘Second-run Stadia PC RPG’

Back in August, Baldur’s Gate 3 launched for Pc. It hit a remarkable 800,000 concurrent Steam players and acquired PC Gamer’s highest review score in 16 years. The huge success of Baldur’s Gate 3 has been impossible to ignore since the game’s full reveal early last month. It launched for Sony’s PlayStation 5 console earlier this month and will make its way to MacOS alongside its third major patch update. However, it almost seems mysterious that the title isn’t playable on Xbox yet.

Microsoft Documents Revealed That The Company Heavily Underestimated Baldur’s Gate 3

It is pertinent to mention here that the emails between executives were from last May. However, the leak comes amid Microsoft’s legal proceedings with the FTC. Now, let’s talk about what makes matters worse for Microsoft Gaming. It is quite clear in the emails that CEO Phil Spencer was pushing his team to fill gaps in the company’s Game Pass offerings. Moreover, the company appeared to expect that Larian Studios would want $5 million in return for the game’s inclusion in Game Pass. On the other hand, games like Suicide Squad, Mortal Kombat, and Jedi Survivor were listed as having anticipated partner asks of more than $250 million.

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer didn’t think its RPG would be this big of a deal. Larian’s director of publishing, Michael Douse stated:

“There just isn’t any existing data that could have told anyone how BG3 was going to perform,”

Baldur’s Gate 3 will reportedly launch for the Xbox Series X and S consoles by the end of 2023. The Xbox Series S version will not support the game’s split-screen co-op mod at launch. However, Microsoft says it is working to include that feature in a post-launch update.